Gary Young's Blog

Gary tells us how powerful it is to write down what we want. His desire to homestead in Canada became a virtual blueprint the day he put it in writing.

You know, I started making paradigm shifts early in my life, although I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. That happened because I changed my desire about life. And that desire was to be, first of all, different. What did that mean to me when I was 9 years old? I didn’t actually know. I just knew I didn’t want to be poor; I didn’t want to grow up like my father; and I didn’t want my children, when that time came, to grow up like I did.

One of the things I learned from this experience was to know what it is that you don’t want and to write it down. Know what it is you don’t want. I wrote down, when I was a young boy, what I didn’t want in life.

But I also wrote down what I did want. I remember back in 1963, 1964, writing down my desire to go to Canada to homestead and carve a ranch out of the wilderness—and I did it at the age of 18. Age has no bearing on ability. Age has never been a factor for me in doing something.

But so many times we get locked into a “Well, I’m not old enough” or “I’m too young” or “I’m too this” or “I’m too that” or “I’m a woman and I can’t do it” or “I’m a guy and I can’t be a salesman because I can’t bat my eyes just right.” It doesn’t matter what sex you are; it doesn’t matter where you are in life.

We all make excuses for not doing things, and we often don’t realize we’re making excuses. Sometimes, we spend more time justifying not doing something than if we just DID it!

Gary Young the farmer, logger, essential oil authority, chromatography expert, builder, businessman, explorer, teacher, author, lecturer, husband, and father. The man who DID succeed!

Why was I voted least likely to succeed? Because my father was poor. We were poor growing up. I fought my way through school, because kids would make fun of me because I wore old-fashioned clothes. I had holes in my pants because they were hand-me-downs from my cousins.

But what that created in me was the desire to improve and better my life, not to feel sorry for myself. Because my father didn’t have the money to buy me clothes, I started my own business when I was 9 years old, my very first business. You know what it was? Trapping. I trapped beaver, bobcat, muskrat, and coyotes in the wintertime. I would build stretchers and stretch their pelts, and then when my father would go to Idaho Falls to the fur traders, he’d take my pelts and sell them.

Back in the late 50s, I was getting $3.50 for a bobcat pelt, $2 or $2.50 for a good coyote pelt, and as much as $15 for a good beaver pelt. My father would sell my pelts, my furs, and bring the money home. I’d put it in my little bank account, and then in the spring we’d go to the stock auction, and I would buy baby calves with my money. I would feed the calves through the spring, summer, and fall, and then I would sell them and put the money in my bank account. So from the time I was in the 4^th grade, my father never bought me clothes for school again; I bought all my own clothes.

One time I got really tired of being humiliated and being made fun of because I couldn’t afford a pair of cowboy boots. So I went to a leather store and bought leather, and I made a pair of cowboy boots that was the envy of everybody in school. I hand stitched them myself. It took me 3½ months to make my first pair of cowboy boots. I never wore them out—the only pair of boots I never wore out. I wore them until my feet outgrew them.

This photo shows the man voted “least likely to succeed” in high school, Gary Young. Gary is working with the world’s foremost chromatography expert, Dr. Hervé Casabianca, sitting to Gary’s right at the GC-MS instrument in the Young Living Guayaquil, Ecuador laboratory.

If you’re not writing and you’re not recording, you have nothing to go back to, to evaluate whether you made a shift to change or not, and so you will think or convince yourself that you made a change while you did not. Because you want it, you will self-talk it, but it hasn’t manifested in reality, so you have not made a change. That’s why you’re still doing the same thing you’ve always done and getting the same results, whether it’s about your health, your finances, your spirituality, or your relationships. It’s the same thing.

Now does that mean you’re not going to have momentary success? No, of course you will. You’ll succeed in spite of yourself in some areas and fail in others.

You must recognize what is causing your failures, what is causing the fact that you just haven’t been able to break this barrier. Why is it that you feel you cannot go up to someone to talk about Young Living? I have listened to excuses until I could write an encyclopedia of people telling me, “Well, I just don’t have the personality.” That is the sorriest excuse I’ve heard. Your personality has nothing to do with your success. I want you to write that down: my personality has nothing to do with my success.

I’ve shared this before, and for you who are new, I’ll share it again. In 1966, before I graduated from high school, I was voted the least likely to succeed in life by my graduating class. I will tell you why next week!

Gary says you can't really know who you are and what your strengths are if you don't write them down.

I want you to write this down: how many times have I created my own self-sabotage? I want you to ask yourself while you’re writing it down, did I sabotage myself unconsciously, consciously, subconsciously, or willingly? The answer will likely be “yes” to all of those.

Then after you’ve written that down, just close your eyes for a minute and think about the last time you can remember when you literally failed at something you were doing; look at what contributed to that failure.

A lot of people blame the crashing economy for their failure, true or false? Young Living is one of the fastest and strongest growing companies in the world through this whole economic downturn. Why? Belief. But it’s more than that. The economy doesn’t dictate your success. But if you believe it does, then that’s where it’s going to take you.

You have to change into a space of “knowing” in order to change your paradigm; it’s as simple as that. And you cannot move into a space of knowing until you know who you are and what your strength, or power, is. How can you know what that is if you don’t write it down and look at it? All of us have created things in our lives, but do you have something to look back on to evaluate what you’ve accomplished?

If I were at the distillery, I could pull out my distillery logs for the last 20 years. Because I have written records, I can go back and see where a mistake was made, so we don’t repeat that same mistake again. This is just a simple example of where writing down what we’ve done helps us to succeed.

In this photo Gary is cutting fir trees--a familiar sight to those who participate in the YL winter harvest. Gary wonders if his logging accident in 1973 was a result of a faulty paradigm?

When I was a preteen, I listened to my father tell a friend, “You know, with my luck, if I were riding my horse down the trail and saw a large gold nugget lying on the trail, by the time I picked it up, put it in my saddlebag, and got it to the bank, it would have turned into a road apple.” (For city folks, a road apple is a cow pie.)

That was my father’s belief system that I grew up with, that nothing good could happen in my father’s life. Then he died as a result of an accident and cancer at the age of 60. I took care of him, paid his hospital bills, paid for his funeral, including his coffin, because he died penniless and left my mother with nothing. Then I took care of her until she died two years ago.

So I look at this and know it was difficult for my father because he watched me as I left home, went out on my own, started developing a business, and was becoming successful. It angered my father. He had a great deal of resentment about my success in life. Subconsciously, I would do things to destroy my success, because I didn’t want to lose my father’s approval. It took me a long time to realize what I was doing.

I believe my accident in 1973 was related to that very thing, because I was a very successful logger in Canada and had two incredible contracts at the very young age of 22 that any other logger would have been thrilled to have. I really have wondered if I created that accident because I didn’t want my father to be upset with me for being more successful than he was. 

So we do things subconsciously because we’ve set up our paradigm and don’t realize it. We act it out or we live it out and then wonder why we can’t succeed in business or in other areas of our lives. No matter what I’ve done in my life, I’ve always been blessed to be successful, but I had to hold tight to that success because of my tendency to self-sabotage.